Free Fear Collector by Gregg Olsen Page B

shaking then, hoping and praying that what he was thinking would not be true.
    Could Michael have done this?
     
     
    That night Tavio Navarro couldn’t sleep. With Mimi curled up next to him, he tried to stay still and not wake her. She was a light sleeper and needed her rest. Every day she woke up at 4:30 to make her husband’s lunch before she left for the school cafeteria where she worked preparing breakfast and lunch, then off to classes at Tacoma Community College. Mimi Navarro worked hard. They all did. As Tavio stared at the ceiling, he reminded himself that there was nothing but worry to be gained by making assumptions about someone. Although he’d never had the kind of brush with the law that his brother Michael had experienced, he’d been looked at with suspicious eyes in the past. He figured it was always the other guy’s problem, not his. If they wanted to think poorly of him because of his light brown skin, black hair, the accent in his speech, so be it. He could not stop them. He couldn’t explain what they could never understand: He was just like them.
    And yet he was thinking the worst of his brother. He was thinking, just maybe, he had had made a terrible mistake, a mistake like he’d made once before . . . times one million. A mistake that would send them out of the country
    That summer there had been several high-profile cases in nearby Seattle in which illegals had committed some crime only for the authorities to discover that they’d already been deported once. One man ran over a girl pushing a grocery cart across a busy roadway. Another man had raped a woman. Both cases had drawn considerable fire and ire from anti-immigration proponents because the offenders had used the legal system for nothing short of a ride back to their homeland after committing a serious crime. They barely even waited for the dust to settle before they’d returned to the U.S.
    Tavio wanted only to raise his family in a place of opportunity. He followed all the laws, he paid his taxes, and he even employed other workers. He was living the American dream.
    Michael, he feared, was another matter. Michael was six years younger, had a slighter build, and was different from his brother in every other way. Tavio thought hard work was the answer to every problem. Michael wanted to party and live a life of no responsibility. He liked hip-hop, not mariachi. He liked tequila, not beer. He liked girls who were younger than him—girls who were lithe and pretty.
    Like the one Tavio had seen on TV.
    “I’d like to get me some of that, bro,” he said when they were watching a news report about a missing Tacoma girl.
    “She’s too young,” Tavio said.
    “Young feels good to me, Tav.”
    “You said you were going to date someone your own age.”
    “Those girls are all used up.”
    Mimi came in the room just then.
    “You are a pig,” she said, giving her brother-in-law a cold look. She put down the laundry basket and started folding hand towels. “Pig,” she repeated.
    “I don’t get many complaints,” Michael said, almost at once knowing that he’d said the wrong thing.
    “What about Catalina?” Tavio asked.
    Michael jumped up from the sofa. His jawline had tightened and his eyes flashed anger.
    “Are you always going to bring that up? When am I going to be able to put that behind me?”
    It was a fair question, but Mimi didn’t bail him out by saying so. She continued to fold the laundry, barely glancing at her husband.
    “You want to talk about it, do you?” Tavio asked Michael.
    “I want you to forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. You know that. I am your brother. You are supposed to be on my side.”
    Tavio reached for the remote control and turned off the TV.
    “I will always be on your side,” he said. “Even when you are wrong. You are my blood, Michael. But that doesn’t mean I won’t worry about you and worry about the things you have done.”
    Mimi looked up. “Yes, Catalina will always be a